Dirk, organize a seminar in Germany with Irakly (he does them all over the world ... he's in Russia as we speak, and did one in San Francisco a few weeks ago). If my schedule permits, I'll come with him, and we'll do it together !!!! Irakly's talent is without question, and his enthusiastic teaching style is positively infectious. We'll even provide you with some side lessons in PS ; -)
I must agree that the 20D is a very good DSLR for the money, but it has it's known shortcomings. My only point is that unless you are cranking out a lot of quick turn-around images, it's hard to beat a N-1 equipped with Zeiss lenses... and scanning with your Nikon 4000 ... all of which you already own.
Putting Zeiss glass on the 20D or any Canon DSLR is an improvement for sure (as DJ can also probably confirm). But it's a pain in the rear doing stop-down metering and not easy to manually focus the 300D or 20D due to their smaller viewfinder window ... even with the Katzeye screen. It's a pain worth enduring to get the better images the Contax C/Y lenses provide. However, the price of the C/Y glass has soared to new highs because so many Canon users are snapping up everything in sight. $4,000 for a 21/2.8? Come on now! For $4,000. you can buy a Hasselblad SWC and blow away anything taken with a C/Y 21/2.8 ; -)
Anyway, I for one am not ready to abandon the pictorial qualities of film shot with these fabulous lenses for the pixel perfection of digital. I also resent sitting here processing hundreds and hundreds of digital wedding images ... and have returned to shooting more film with 35mm and 6X6 cameras sporting Zeiss optics. I get my film back in a day which is faster than I can process that many digital images even with PSCS2's new RAW developer.
Here's a grab shot Irakly took of me being a bad boy by smoking. He did it with my N-1 and 50/1.4. I still like the pictorial feel of film, so I keep on shooting it.
Not knocking digital, but it just doesn't have that basic emotional pictorial feel to me.